Folding and inserting machines conventionally comprise three principal elements: an empty envelope feeder, a feeder of documents having to be inserted into these envelopes, a station for folding these documents incorporating one or more folders and a station for inserting the folded documents into the empty envelopes. At the close of the folding and inserting process, the envelopes, which are or are not closed (depending on whether the machine comprises an internal sealing module), are ejected through an exit slot of the machine into a receiving device arranged at the exit of this machine and intended to receive these envelopes. At the present time, these machines can handle mail items of any type and any format and the receiving device must therefore be able to receive and store all these mail items correctly. This is why these devices are mostly constituted by a simple tray in which the mail items of all formats are stored flat and in bulk in a stack of low capacity (about 100 to 200 envelopes of average thickness), as they are being handled.
Unfortunately, this tray is often poorly adapted to the folding and inserting machine and, once full, it is difficult to remove the mail items therefrom without taking hold of the tray itself.
When the receiving device is fixed to the machine, it is most often done so by fixation means whose installation requires that the machine be lifted at least partly, which may be the cause of accidents.
It is an object of the present invention to overcome these drawbacks by proposing a receiving device which is compact (i.e. with reduced space requirement) and ergonomic, particularly adapted to a folding and inserting machine and which does not require to be withdrawn in order to extract the mail items that it contains therefrom. Another object of the invention is to propose a device which is simple to fix to the machine and which does not necessitate any structural modification of the latter.